9 Lost Inventions That Could Have Changed The World

4. Wireless Power Transmission

Until quite recently when, for some reason, the internet got a collective Nikola Tesla boner, he had managed to fly under somewhat under the historical radar. Frankly, the sheer amount of Tesla's genius inventions that never came to pass probably deserve their own article, but there was one in particular that could have literally changed the world as we know it. Tesla was obsessed with creating a way to transmit electricity wirelessly. He devised what is now known as the Tesla Coil, which generated high AC voltages. These were indeed able to transmit electricity wirelessly over short distances, and Tesla was convinced he could make it work over a much larger area. In Tesla's future, electricity would rain down from the atmosphere and charge everything in your home, freeing us all from the shackles of a slightly-too-short phone charger forever. There were a couple of problems though. He began work on the Wardenclyffe Tower, also called the Tesla Tower, that was going to distributed wireless electricity through the ionosphere and realise Tesla's utopia. However, investors started to drop out. One of the problems was that he had not actually been able to demonstrate his theories on a grand scale (because that required, you know, building the tower first). The real kicker, however, is that Tesla's wireless energy would be very difficult to monitor, track and control, making it difficult for energy companies to make any money out of it. Great for the consumers, but for some reason a zero-return investment didn't seem all that great to the people with the money.